Investing in Human Capital: Achieving Organizational Competitiveness Through Gamification

To achieve success for companies starting in gamification, the first design point is to motivate players to achieve their goals – and those goals should overlap with the business goals. – Brian Burke (2013). Human capital is the key to organizational competitiveness. Human resource management is concerned with the management of people within organizations. The field is primarily concerned with the selection, training and development and leadership of human resources. Human Resource Management is a science because experimental and field studies are conducted to explore how best to utilize human resources as a competitive advantage. In his book, Competitive Advantage Through People, Jeffrey Pfeiffer (1994) explains that organizations can gain a competitive advantage through their employees by ensuring that they use the best talent management strategies to identify, promote and sustain top talent within the organization. Pfeiffer argues that organizations have become complacent about the impact of employees on organizational effectiveness and that organizations need to be aware that one of the biggest assets they have is through the people who work for them; this leverage of people provides organizations with a competitive advantage. Human Resources professionals act as consultants to organizations to help them create effective systems that leverage this talent. For example, an HR consultant can provide organizations with strategic performance appraisal systems that allow organizations to provide feedback to all employees and to also identify top employees in order to reward them through compensation and promotion.